In brief
Lolita is about the rape of a child. Humbert Humbert, a European scholar in his late thirties, takes a room in a New England town in 1947 and marries a widow to stay near her twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze. When the mother is killed by a car, he collects the girl from summer camp without telling her, rapes her at a hotel, and only then tells her that her mother is dead. For about two years he keeps her, on the road and then in a college town, posing as her father. She gets away at fourteen with another predatory man, leaves him too, marries and is expecting a child when Humbert finds her at seventeen. She refuses to go with him. He shoots the other man, writes this book in custody and dies of a heart attack before his trial. She dies in childbirth on Christmas Day 1952.
All of this is told by him. He is witty, learned, self-mocking and at times heartbroken, and that is the problem the novel sets out to create. It is not a love story, though many readers have called it one.
The argument
Nabokov’s novel shows, I think, that beauty can be used as an alibi, and it proves this on the reader. Humbert announces the plan almost at once: “count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”, he says in his first chapter, and goes straight on to “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury”. It is a plea. Each paragraph is built to make you enjoy his company and accept his terms. A reader who is carried along has done what he wanted. Lionel Trilling, one of the book’s first champions, admitted as much in 1958: “we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents”, he wrote, having been “seduced into conniving”.
Nabokov leaves the evidence in asides, always brief. At the end of Part One, after the hotel, the child comes to his room in tears, and he explains why with a sentence that gives up the whole defence: “she had absolutely nowhere else to go”. A little later he sums up their year of travelling as maps, tour books, old tires and “her sobs in the night—every night, every night”.
Humbert’s last and best passage is the one many readers take as redemption. Standing above a mining town, he hears children playing far below, and understands that the loss he caused is “the absence of her voice from that concord”. The recognition is real, and he passes sentence on himself: he would have given Humbert “at least thirty-five years for rape”. Then he ends by offering her immortality in his book, “the refuge of art”. She never asked for it, and she is dead when you read it. Even his remorse is a fine piece of writing that takes the child for its material, which is what the book knows and its admirers often do not.
Her name
Her name is Dolores Haze. “Lolita” is what Humbert calls her, a private word for a private fantasy. He tells us so in his first chapter, listing what she was to others: she is Dolly at school, and “She was Dolores on the dotted line”. The title is therefore the first thing the narrator has taken from her, and every reader who says it is speaking his language before opening the book. Dolores is also the Spanish word for sorrows.
“A Lolita” came to mean a sexually precocious girl, and the word nymphet, which Humbert coins to turn children into a category of temptation, went into dictionaries. Both repeat his defence. On French television in 1975 Nabokov said that she was not a perverted girl but “a poor child” who is debauched.
The shape of the book
The novel has two parts. Part One, thirty-three short chapters, runs from Humbert’s childhood and his first love in Europe through Ramsdale to the hotel. Part Two covers the year of motels, Beardsley, the second road trip and her escape, then his three-year hunt, the visit to her in Coalmont and the killing of Clare Quilty. A foreword and, since 1958, Nabokov’s afterword enclose it. That frame puts a false editor at the front and the real author at the back, each telling you what the book means and each, I think, partly wrong. The motels and billboards of the road trip are observed with real love, one more distraction from what is happening in the passenger seat.
The voice
Humbert’s English is the book’s great seduction. The allusions keep the educated reader pleased at being educated, and the self-accusation arrives so regularly that it works as charm. He tells you he is a monster so that you will say he is too hard on himself.
What the voice cannot do is listen. Richard Rorty’s essay “The Barber of Kasbeam” (1989) takes this as the point. A barber in a small town talks on about his son, and Humbert realises only afterwards that the son has been dead for thirty years. Rorty calls Humbert a “monster of incuriosity”, “exquisitely sensitive” to whatever touches his obsession and blank about everyone else. Humbert treats Dolores in the same way: the clues to her life are all on the page and he does not take them in. Nabokov called such details the “nerves of the novel”.
Véra Nabokov saw it first. In her diary in 1958 she wished that someone would notice the description of “the child’s helplessness” and her “heartrending courage”. Few did.
John Ray’s foreword
The book opens with a note by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., an invented psychologist who has been handed the manuscript by Humbert’s lawyer. Ray condemns Humbert as “a shining example of moral leprosy”, then admires his “singing violin”, which he says conjures up compassion for the girl and leaves us entranced with the book. He predicts it will be “a classic in psychiatric circles” and promises an “ethical impact” on parents and educators. Nabokov’s afterword flatly refuses this: the book, he says, “has no moral in tow”.
Ray’s foreword does something more serious in passing. Like an editor tidying up, he reports what became of the people in the story. Humbert died in legal captivity on 16 November 1952. And in a list of minor characters: a Mrs “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in a remote settlement called Gray Star. No first-time reader knows who that is. She is Dolores. The fact that matters most is told before the book starts, by a fool, among news of a college sophomore and a hotel owner, and the reader goes on to enjoy three hundred pages without knowing it.
Sally Horner
Humbert drops a real name into Part Two, Chapter 33, in a passing question: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps”, he asks, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, did to Sally Horner, eleven, in 1948. He does not answer. Florence “Sally” Horner of Camden, New Jersey, was ten when she was caught taking a five-cent notebook from Woolworth’s on a dare. Frank La Salle, recently out on parole, told her he was an FBI agent and could send her to reform school. In June 1948, aged eleven, she was taken away on a story of a holiday at the shore. For twenty-one months he took her from state to state, posing as her father, and raped her. In March 1950, in San Jose, she told a neighbour and telephoned home. He was sentenced to 30 to 35 years and died in prison. She died in a car accident on 18 August 1952, aged fifteen.
The critic Alexander Dolinin set out the link in 2005, and Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita (2018) made it widely known; her Hazlitt essay is free. Nabokov consistently denied the connection. His The Enchanter, written in Russian in 1939, already has a man and a child travelling as father and daughter, so Horner cannot be the origin. What the case takes away is the option of treating the plot as a fable. It happened, to a child with a name, and she got out because she told someone. Dolores has nobody to tell.
The people
Dolores Haze
Dolores is a bright, ordinary, irritating, funny American child, who likes comics and movies and plays good tennis. She appears only through a narrator who has every reason to misrepresent her, and he tells us she started it, which is what abusers say. Her acts can be read through him. She tries to make friends, acts in the school play and escapes. At seventeen, married and poor, she refuses him and takes the money he brings. She sees him clearly and declines to be charmed.
Humbert Humbert
The name is a pseudonym of his own choosing, doubled. He is a rapist and in the end a murderer, and he is a superb writer. Nabokov called the character a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear “touching”. A good reading keeps both facts in view.
Clare Quilty
Quilty is a playwright and pornographer who follows them across the country and helps her get away, for his own ends. Humbert makes him a double and kills him in a long farcical scene, an attempt to put his own guilt into another body.
Charlotte Haze
Charlotte is the book’s other victim. Humbert mocks her for her taste and pretensions and we laugh, then she finds his diary, reads the truth, runs into the road and is killed.
Publication and bans
Nabokov finished on 6 December 1953, after five years. Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus and Doubleday all turned it down. According to Stacy Schiff’s biography, Véra pulled the manuscript back from the fire when he tried to burn it. It reached Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, whose list was largely pornography. It appeared in September 1955 in two green paperbacks full of misprints.
Nobody reviewed it until Graham Greene named it among the best books of the year in the London Sunday Times. John Gordon of the Sunday Express answered that it was “the filthiest book I have ever read”. The Home Office told British Customs to seize copies, and in December 1956 the French Interior Ministry banned it, along with other Olympia titles, for about two years. In August 1958 Putnam’s published it in New York with corrections and the afterword, with no official response, and it was in a third printing within days. Orville Prescott of The New York Times called it “dull, dull, dull”. Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s London edition of 1959 helped end Nigel Nicolson’s career in Parliament. It has also been banned in Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium and Myanmar, and two American school districts restricted it in 2023.
The censors and many admirers made the same mistake, taking the book for erotica. As Joanne Harris noted, it does not contain a single explicit phrase. What it has is a man’s voice.
The Russian Lolita
Nabokov ended the English afterword by lamenting that he had had to abandon his “untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language” for “a second-rate brand of English”. In 1967 he tested the claim. He translated the novel himself and published it in New York with Phaedra, for a Russian readership that could not legally buy it at home. A new postscript took the lament back. The “story of this translation is the story of a disappointment”: the Russian he had imagined behind a locked gate was not there, only burned stumps and autumn emptiness. Humbert’s fluency is an exile’s English, and when Nabokov goes home the voice does not come with him.
Readers and critics
Many early readers took Humbert’s side without noticing. Dorothy Parker in 1958 thought the girl “a dreadful little creature”, and Robertson Davies wrote in 1959 that the book’s theme was “the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child”. Trilling’s essay “The Last Lover” read it largely as a love story. That reading is wrong because it requires a second lover. There is one person in love in this book and one captive, and the love exists to make the captivity sound like something else.
Elizabeth Patnoe finds many critics who “sympathetically incorporate Humbert’s language into their own”. Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s great biographer, has denied that it is rape “in any ordinary sense”, and Peter Rabinowitz has answered that such high-minded readings amount to “a blame-the-victim reading”. I side with Rabinowitz. A twelve-year-old cannot consent, she has nowhere else to go, and Humbert uses the word himself. In Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) Azar Nafisi, teaching women under a regime that decided who they were, read it as one person’s life confiscated by another.
Afterlives
Stanley Kubrick’s film (1962), with James Mason and Sue Lyon, used little of the screenplay Nabokov was nominated for. Adrian Lyne’s film (1997) has Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry’s musical Lolita, My Love (1971) closed before New York. Edward Albee’s play (1981) was a fiasco. Rodion Shchedrin’s opera opened in Stockholm in 1994. Jamie Loftus’s podcast of 2020 argues that adaptations and marketing have twisted the book’s condemnation of Humbert.
What is free, and where
There is no legal free text of Lolita, so this page links none. Nabokov died on 2 July 1977, so in the EU, at life plus seventy years, the novel is protected until 1 January 2048. In the United States protection runs ninety-five years from publication: on the published dates that means 1 January 2051 for the Paris text of 1955 and 1 January 2054 for the American edition of 1958, by the rule set out in Cornell’s chart. Full texts on the open web are pirated. Libraries have it. What can be read free is Cornell’s exhibit on its publication and the Wikipedia and Hazlitt pages linked here. Only a handful of short phrases from the novel are quoted here, each under a dozen words.
How to read it
- Read for what he leaves out. Count how often she speaks.
- Remember how old she is. His prose works hard to make you forget it. She is twelve.
- Use the annotated edition. Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita (first published in 1970, revised 1991) explains the allusions and word games. Its notes are chiefly about the craft, so keep your own eye on the child.
- Finish, then reread the foreword. You will meet Mrs Schiller again, and the book changes.
Read next
- Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita (2018). Sally Horner’s story told as hers, with the novel in the background.
- Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa (2020). A novel about a girl groomed by her teacher, who hands her this very book, narrated by the grown woman who still half believes him.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962). Another mad commentator, and the same delight in leaving a reader to catch him out.